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Education Lifestyle

Nadia Esmail: Flight director, Air Transat

I work for Air Transat as a flight director, but the responsibilities are the same as a flight attendant. My job is to get passengers to their destination safely while providing great customer service.

Speaking their language makes that a lot easier. 

After high school I went to the University of Ottawa. I have a major in trilingual translation and a minor in Spanish. At the end of April, I will have completed the certificate in Portuguese through continuing education at George Brown College. 

After having taken a few levels of Portuguese, I found I had enough knowledge to practise with passengers on board. We’re a vacation airline, so we fly to Portugal and hopefully in the future to Brazil. We have Portuguese-speaking passengers, some of whom are elderly and travel alone, so I take that opportunity to use my Portuguese. Even if I make mistakes I can tell they appreciate that I’m trying to communicate in their own language. 

Languages seem to be my thing. It started when my parents put me in French immersion, and then in high school, Spanish courses were brought into the curriculum. I continued that into university and ended up at Ottawa U because it’s the only university that offered trilingual translation. 

Getting a job as a flight attendant is competitive. We’re actually hiring right now. You don’t need to go to school to get a job as a flight attendant. We get people fresh out of high school, teachers, engineers – anybody can be a flight attendant if you have the right personality.

Air Transat hired me for my Spanish, and I mentioned that I had a goal of learning five languages before I turned 30. I had English, French and Spanish and when I started my career as a flight attendant I met several people from Portugal and Brazil who became friends. 

My background is Indian, but part of my family is from the Portuguese-speaking country of Mozambique. When they left Africa, they immigrated to Portugal, and when I realized I had a connection to the language I made that my choice.

Studying language in college was very different from university, but in a good way. The more advanced classes are usually small, but the biggest difference is that no one is left behind. If you don’t understand something, it’s explained. There was another flight attendant in my class, and that made it a lot of fun because the instructor tailored the classes around what we needed. We’re all adults with full-time day jobs and all learning Portuguese for different reasons, so we could tell the instructor our needs. 

I’m always trying to improve my vocabulary. Even though I might understand what a passenger is asking, I don’t always have the words to respond. I have a Portuguese-English dictionary app on my phone that I can use in airplane mode, and that helps. Another challenge is understanding different dialects, especially at full speed. 

Last year I qualified in Portuguese so they can use me on flights to Portugal. I read the announcements, assist passengers and communicate with representatives at destinations. The added bonus is that I get paid extra for that. Layovers are part of my job. I have an uncle in Lisbon who married a lovely Portuguese lady who doesn’t speak much English, so I have lots of fun on layovers there.

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